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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/22629304">Exposure Therapy</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/Metronomeblue/pseuds/Metronomeblue'>Metronomeblue</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Critical Role (Web Series)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>(briefly but present), Anna Ripley Does Horrible Things, Asphyxiation, Bisexual Female Character, Bisexual Male Character, Blacksmithing, Blood Drinking, Blood Kink, Blood and Gore, Body Dysphoria, Body Image, Bondage, Branding, Canon Bisexual Character, Canon-Typical Violence, Canonical Character Death, Chair Bondage, Child Death, Cock &amp; Ball Torture, Cock Rings, Conditioning, Consent Issues, Corruption, Deal with a Devil, Dehumanization, Dissociation, Engineering, Exsanguination, F/F, F/M, Flashbacks, Forced Ejaculation, Forced Orgasm, Forced Voyeurism, Found Family, Gags, Gentle Kissing, Grief/Mourning, Guilt, Gun Violence, Gunshot Wounds, Humiliation, I wish I was smart enough to write Percy better, Imprisonment, Insomnia, Just a reminder because the ENTIRE de Rolo family does die, M/M, Master/Pet, Masturbation, Murder Kink, Near Death Experiences, Nightmares, Non-Consensual Blood Drinking, Non-Consensual Body Modification, Non-Consensual Bondage, Non-Consensual Kissing, Non-Consensual Voyeurism, Orthax is a very bad influence, Panic Attacks, Past Rape/Non-con, Past Torture, Post-Fall of Whitestone, Pre-Canon, Prison, Psychological Torture, Psychological Trauma, Rape Recovery, Revenge, Scars, Self-Harm, Sex Work, Slow Burn, Suicidal Ideation, Suicidal Thoughts, Survivor Guilt, Team as Family, This is a fic about Recovery, Threats of Rape/Non-Con, Threats of Violence, Torture, Underage Rape/Non-con, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, Vax and Vex and Percy are all bi, Vex and Percy take for e ve r, Warlock Pacts, Warning: Anna Ripley, Whump, as are other people but rn that's who those tags refer to lol, as they should tbh, at different points, because Ripley is a creep, because the Briarwoods are creepy, erotic asphyxiation, i suppose? genuinely don't know if this qualifies lol, not all of these things are related but many of them are, that would also be Ripley and the Briarwoods, though at this point much of it is memory or in dreams, we're tagging for exclusion AND warning purposes in 2020, which is to say a LOT, which means it is not necessarily pleasant at first</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>In-Progress</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-02-09</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-02-10</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-04-28 09:29:33</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Explicit</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con, Underage</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>2</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>16,615</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/22629304</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/Metronomeblue/pseuds/Metronomeblue</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>He ends the day painted in sweat, hair dark with it, shirt soaked through, oil and smoke and soot smeared over his face. He has never felt further from being Percival de Rolo, and yet he feels, curiously, as if for the first time he is truly himself. His chest roils, swells, burns, as if he’s breathed in too much smoke, and he passes out, facedown on the cot, hand still clutching the chambers.</p>
<p>He dreams he’s back in Whitestone, that people are screaming and crying and running. But he has the gun in his hand, he has power, he has the ability to change things.</p>
<p>_____________</p>
<p>Percy starts at rock bottom. Somehow things get worse, and though one day they'll get better, it's a long journey back to being okay, and he makes it slowly. Or, alternately, Percival de Rolo does his best to work through the aftermath of his backstory without any kind of counseling, and occasionally succeeds.</p>
<p>(what will be later known as "Percy and Vex invent sex therapy")</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Delilah Briarwood/Sylas Briarwood/Anna Ripley, I say as if there is a good way, Percival "Percy" Fredrickstein Von Musel Klossowski de Rolo III/Anna Ripley, Percival "Percy" Fredrickstein Von Musel Klossowski de Rolo III/Vex'ahlia, and not in a good way - Relationship</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>17</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>97</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>1. The Unfairness of It All; or, alternately, Percival de Rolo Invents the Revolver</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>First and foremost- this fic is almost entirely based on my own deeply unhealthy coping mechanisms and my tendency to use sex and violence as forms of self-harm, and as such is probably fairly heavy, if not outright mildly disturbing. It will get less horrible, as time passes and Percy gets better, but the first few chapters are going to continue along these lines. The entire point of it, in fact, is to show the upwards (and sometimes downward) progression of Percy's state of mind.</p>
<p>Second of all- those tags are not for show. I tagged everything I could see and think of in the first chapter alone, both so that people could filter the story out if those things would upset them and so that people would be properly warned about every single possible horrible thing I could find a descriptor for. Please take care of yourself and walk away if anything seems like it'll be too much for you. It's too much for me sometimes! That's part of why I haven't finished the whole story yet. </p>
<p>Third- I wrote this before the last few(?) issues of Vox Machina Origins were released so I don't actually know how canon-accurate that last scene is. Or the ones that will follow it. But oh well! I did my best with what I had at the time. I wasn't originally even going to post this until it was finished but I crave validation, so here we are.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <span>He’s a fisherman the first two years after. “Good ol’ Perce,” they call him, and they don’t know his last name. He washed up on their boat, tangled in their nets, half-frozen, half-drowned. He remembers their voices, concern. He remembers passing out, black filling his vision. He woke up in a bunk, three blankets over him and a concerned old man peering curiously at him.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Well now, lad,” the man said, scratching his head. “You’ve been through hell, haven’t ya?” Percy took a breath, choked on his own blood, and coughed it up. He leaned over the side, and the old man slid a rusty, fish-smelling bucket under his face as he spat up blood and seawater. He could feel stitches pulling, wounds aching. They’d taken care of him. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Yes,” he said eventually, breathing hard, face pressed into the rim of a steel bucket. “I’ve been through something.” </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>The old man pats his back kindly, and introduces himself as Captain Spindley Krame. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“You can have a place here if you like,” he offers, and his men nod, happy to take on someone who needs help. They’ll work him to the bone, one of them swears, but Percy doesn’t mind that. He’s been worked harder. He’s got nothing left to fear from labor. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Percy takes their offer, and he crops his hair down almost to his scalp in the hope that it will grow back dark. It never does. He never sees himself with dark hair again, though sometimes he dreams of it. He dreams he wakes, pale, pale face crowned once more with his mother’s deep brown hair, body unscarred and mind unburdened, his family alive and happy and waiting, and a faint relief fills him. And then he wakes, bleached white with grief, and he cannot sleep again.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>He takes late watches more often than not, forgoing sleep for escape, and the hollow sockets of his skull gape dark around his ice chip eyes. The other men don’t worry, exactly, but they try to give him advice. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“You just have to tell yourself a story,” Fiven says, huffing as he wraps a rope around an anchor on the edge of the ship. “You make something up, and your brain follows the trail until it gets tired.” Percy says nothing, but nods, smiling in thanks. He speaks little, these days.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>He tries it that night, makes up a sweet tale the like of which he used to tell Oliver and Whitney, Ludwig inevitably already asleep in the far corner. Two field mice, he thinks, a father and mother. They go to market, to buy strawberries. He imagines in detail the wooded path they take, the soft sunlight streaming through the faraway leaves. He paints a lovely picture, warmer and gentler than any he’s had to cling to in a long time. It almost works. But he falls asleep, and his mind takes over. The world twists. The field mice return home to find their children slaughtered. They take that lovely warm sunlit path home, and open their doors and wail to see their seven sweet children torn open. The eldest two are split open, bleeding, the third eldest torn to pieces. The younger ones flung left and right, bruised and bloody. An owl, the owl that committed the slaughter, he knows, picks up the husband in her claws, snatches him from the door. Percy wants to stop it. He wants to leave. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Why?” The mother sobs, pushing the door closed, clutching her youngest, her smallest, the one he knows is named Cassandra. “Why would you do this to us?” The owl swallows her husband whole, ruffling her perfect glossy feathers, all black and grey, and smiles. Somehow, she smiles.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“It’s in my nature,” she says kindly, as she rips the mice’s door off it’s tiny, finely crafted hinges. “It’s what I am,” she says, plucking the poor dead morsel from its mother’s desperate hold. She swallows her, too, a single gulp, so small was she. The owl leans in close, and Percy hears his mother’s flesh burn. He hears the slick, awful thud of Cassandra’s chest being run through with arrows. The owl takes the mother mouse in her talons and spears her, and the mouse screams just like his mother, the owl laughs like Ripley. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Percy takes three watches that night, trying not to sleep. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Take some tea,” Leslie says, passing him a rudimentary thermos, and he tries, he drinks two cups before she’s done with him, but he lies awake, dozes off only for two hours fraught with Ludwig’s painful, awful wailing, the sound of his younger brother’s arms being pulled from their sockets, twisted out of joint. He can hear his screams, little boy screams, high and hysterical, so confused, so afraid, and he remembers trying to call to him, to apologize, to comfort him, but in the dream he never does. Ludwig just screams, and screams, and screams, and Percy lets him.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>He wakes, drinks another cup of tea. Sleeps two more hours, this time lost in a neverending maze of darkness and fire, every door opened only by allowing Ripley to brand him with another iron. The Briarwoods’ crest, Ripley’s name, the word ‘traitor’, over and over his flesh is seared and burned and branded. He finally, finally reaches the center of the maze, but this last door is locked, too. He turns back, shivering, and Ripley hands him the iron, opens the door as if it were never locked. She leads him down the passage to an unlocked door. He opens it, trembling, as she wraps a strong, wiry arm around his bleeding shoulders. It’s his mother, the last moment he saw her alive, pinned to the wall with bars of iron, red-hot and hissing. She struggles, when she sees him, reaches out, crying. Crying “Percy? Percy, please!” And Ripley takes his hand in hers as the Lady Johanna sobs.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Come now, boy,” Ripley says, and he weeps, too, as he presses the iron to his mother’s flesh. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>He doesn’t try the tea again. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>It’s Maxwell who suggests sex, and Percy is reminded, unfortunately, painfully, of Julius. Julius, who’d always said that one day they’d find Percy a nice girl to make him a man, no matter that Percy didn’t feel that was a particularly necessary component of coming of age. It wasn’t meant cruelly, and Percy had never felt… pressured, so to speak. But they’d never gotten around to it. Julius had died, choking on his own blood, reaching for Vesper, as she was dragged up to the parapets, long before Percy even made it to eighteen. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>He’d celebrated that birthday with eighteen scars up the inside of his left thigh and Ripley’s hands on parts of his body he wishes she’d never touched. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>And that truly does set the tone, because Maxwell takes him ashore, some northern town far east of Whitestone, singing all the way from the docks. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“You ever fucked a girl?” He asks, and Percy isn’t entirely sure he’s sober. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Not exactly,” Percy says, voice clipped with poor taste and bad memories. Maxwell laughs, slings an arm around his shoulders in a way that makes Percy uncomfortable. This man is not Julius. What was brotherly teasing and fondness from Julius is bitter and forced from Maxwell, and Percy is making contingency plans for the next ten minutes as they trudge through thick snow. They pass endless houses with dark windows, shops lit by the minimum of one candle, one lantern, perhaps a jar of fairy light or magic. The tavern is deep into town, glowing golden with lantern light and welcoming in ways he didn’t expect from a town like this. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Maxwell finds him a prostitute. Percy has nothing against the poor woman, tries to stay quiet and be polite, and nonetheless feels as if he is inconveniencing her by his mere existence with every word that Maxwell says. She looks at him with sharp eyes, and he shrinks, full of awkwardness and shame.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Now be gentle with the boy!” Maxwell laughs, slapping Percy’s back in just the right way to hit four half-healed scars at once. “But don’t be too shy neither!” She raises her eyebrows at him, then shifts her gaze to Percy, who imagines he must look rather pathetic. He can see himself, almost, the long, thready limbs, the thin, gaunt face, clearly deprived of sleep. The ill-cut shock of bright white hair, like a trembling old man. She can’t see the multitude of scars under his clothes, but he feels them, feels the burn and itch. Absolutely undesirable.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Shall we get away from him?” She asks, and her voice is truly lovely, deep and unpretentious. He nods wordlessly, and she loops an arm through his elbow. Maxwell continues to laugh behind them, but as she leads him upstairs, the noise of him fades. So does the noise from the bar, and the general clatter of the kitchen, and Percy surmises that there is perhaps an enchantment on the staircase. She brings him to a room halfway down the hall, locks the door behind her as his palms grow cold. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“I’m sorry,” he says first, and she looks over her shoulder to examine him. “For Maxwell, I mean. You don’t have to do anything. I can pay you to just… take an hour to rest or something.” She sits calmly on the bed, pulls her legs up to curl at the headboard like a particularly comfortable cat. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“You’d rather not sleep with me?” She asks, seemingly unconcerned. He takes a moment, a long moment to study her, to catalogue the effortless pink curls of her hair, the sharp brown eyes, the pointed ears, the soft flush on her cheeks. She’s affectedly disinterested, false, but pleasantly and benignly so. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“I don’t- I don’t know if I can,” Percy admits, and his voice creaks, cracks, and shame rises like acid in his throat. Her head tilts with sympathy, and her face settles into a concerned frown.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“More into men?” He shakes his head, then stops, sighing. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Not more. I mean, I- I am. But. I’d be fine with either,” he stammers, the truth clotting in his throat. “The last time I did this, I had no choice.” Her eyes sharpen, her frown deepens, and she leans forward. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Are you alright? Are you safe?” He almost laughs. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“I’m- I’m fine. I just haven’t tried… my first time. She didn’t give me a choice. She never gave me a choice after, either.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“That’s awful,” the woman says, voice hoarse. “You really don’t have to- you don’t even have to pay me. It’s alright to just go.” He considers it, for a moment. He almost does. But a part of him wants to know. Wants to try this with someone who doesn’t want to hurt him.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“I don’t want to waste your time,” Percy whispers, and he leans in to kiss her. She leans into it, moves with him, against him, and the kiss is fine, he finds. Kissing is good. It doesn’t raise too much memory, doesn’t stir panic in his chest at all. She rests a hand on his thigh, and his heart stalls. Ripley, he thinks, and the eighteen scars ache under her hand, twinging with each flex of his muscles. She breaks the kiss.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Alright?” She asks, and he shakes his head. She nods. “Okay.” She takes her hand from his leg, rests it on his shoulder. “Better?” He nods, voice thick. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“I’m sorry.” He can’t look her in the eye. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Don’t be.” She kisses him again, and this time he reaches for her, curls a tentative hand over her waist, feels the thick boning of her corset, the soft lace of her dress. She leans into it. “That’s it,” she says encouragingly, smiling into his mouth. “Whatever’s good.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“I never asked your name,” he says, pulling back. She laughs, taps a finger on his nose as he frowns at her.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“How polite you are. You know, many people just don’t care. It’s not a requirement to know the name of the person you fuck,” she’s teasing, but there’s a kernel of truth in it. He knows. But he does care. He likes her. “It’s Winn,” she says, with so much warmth in her voice that he’s put at ease. “Winn Lyle.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Pleasure to make your acquaintance Winn,” he breathes, kissing the corner of her mouth. “Call me Percy.” She smiles again, and their kiss deepens. It’s still fine, it’s still good. Until their positions shift, and he ends up on his back beneath her, her legs splayed over his hips. He can feel his heart beating, loudly, fiercely. He can’t breathe. He feels her hands on him, and in his mind they turn avaricious, hungry, grasping at him. He feels her shift, and his memory pushes forth, forces him to feel her rut her hips into his, sink her teeth into his neck, leave bloody bite marks down his chest. In that moment, she is Ripley, and he is helpless, and he is afraid.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Percy?” Winn asks, and he makes a choked, awful noise like a scream. She slips off of him, and the sudden relief from being weighed down forces him to rise, to slip like a skittish deer from her bed and stumble to the chamber pot and empty his stomach into it. Nothing but bile, nothing but water and blood, and it burns the back of his throat raw. He can feel Winn’s hands tentative on his back, can hear her murmuring soft apologies, and he can only shake his head.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“I’m sorry.” He chokes up more blood, more bile, and he knows, instinctively, that he must have snapped some of the stitches in his abdomen. “I’m sorry, I can’t.” Winn nods, lifting his head to wipe his mouth with a handkerchief. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“I’m sorry,” she says quietly in return. “I hope she burns for what she did to you.” He looks at her, and Winn, though she never sees him again, swears until her dying day that his eyes were flat jet black.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Me too,” he says, voice rough and ruined. “Me too.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Winn pulls him to the wall, takes his glasses, pushes his hair back from his face, even as short as it is. He breathes heavily, back pressed against it, sinking down to the floor, and Winn sits beside him, holding his hand. He waits, and she with him, until his breathing’s gone back to normal. He hands her five gold he can’t afford to give, and she slips four of them back to him when he’s not looking. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>He goes downstairs heavy-hearted and frustrated, though he’s sure to thank her once more. She kisses his cheek, and her hand lingers along his collar, concerned. Maxwell drags him back to the ship, laughing merrily about how he was responsible for Percy’s becoming a man, crowing and loud in the blanketed white of the town. Percy stares grimly ahead, caught in a daze of horror and fury.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>That night he doesn’t dream, and he wakes rested, healthy, and angry. Maxwell jokes that all he needed was a good fuck to relieve all that tension. Krame looks between them and tells Maxwell to go gut the fish for dinner. Percy does his duties, conscientiously not looking at the captain. He can feel Krame’s eyes on him, narrowed and contemplative.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“He force you into it, Perce?” The captain finally asks. Percy pauses, breath clouding heavy in the ice-cold air. Then he returns, feverishly, to work.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“He thought he did. Nothing happened. There’s nothing to worry about.” He keeps moving, pulling the ropes, letting out the sails, moving, moving, moving, because if he stops he’ll remember.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Percy,” the captain starts, and Percy moves faster, as if he can outrun this conversation. “You sure you’re alright?” </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“‘M fine.” He doesn’t look at Krame, staring wide-eyed and empty into the water. “Nothing to worry about.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>That night he lies down in his bunk, alone for the first time in weeks. All his cabin mates are on duty. The wood around him creaks and moans, and he feels close to home, in a way, reminded bittersweetly of the ghostly echoes that haunted Castle Whitestone throughout his childhood. He slips a hand down between his legs, cautious, curious. The brush of weight, skin on fabric on fabric, reminds him of how sensitive he is, how rarely he’s been touched there. He tries not to think of Ripley, tries to imagine Winn, perhaps, or Leighton, whose bright eyes and rough smile remind Percy of the first boy he ever kissed, twelve and fumbling in the gardens. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>He slips his hand into his trousers, still separated from the soft flesh of his cock by a layer of cotton. He tests the waters. He has trouble, even in the dark, separating his memory of Ripley’s hands from the touch of his own, and he feels his breathing rise, his heart beat wildly, and he snatches his hand back with fear and frustration. His blood still throbs, insistently, intently, in his shaft, and he feels himself straining against his clothes. He turns over, intent on sleep. The faintest friction of movement only intensifies his need, and he grits his teeth. Percy sighs, half heartedly reaching down again, and his system floods with adrenaline. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>His hands are Ripley’s hands. His body is hers to use. He sobs, eyes dry, face contorted with loathing, and fists a hand, far too tightly, around the base of his cock. Every stroke reduces him further, makes him smaller, more helpless, more furious and hurt and disgusting. He tries not to sob, tries not to gasp at the painful scratch of fabric on sensitive, overtaxed flesh, thin skin near-broken with being forced against his drawers over and over, lacking any care or kindness. He can feel fluid, hand becoming slick and filthy with it, as he’s overcome with memory. Ripley, hand clawing at his throat as she rode him, forcing him erect with her hands, the burn of air forced from his lungs as she pressed his face between her thighs. Ripley, nails dug into his shaft, a thick noose of twine looped around his throat, goading him, mocking him, forcing him closer and closer to orgasm as he watched, weeping, as Sylas opened Whitney’s throat with his teeth. Ripley, carving eighteen perfect lines into his thigh, the pressure of her body atop the wounds, rutting, pressing her folds into the blood, coming from the pressure of his twitching, painful muscles trying to strain away from her weight. Ripley, kissing him like she owned him.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>He climaxes, gasping, guttering, wrecked and ruined. He cries himself to sleep, his face buried in his hands, still filthy, still wet with his own come. He has never hated himself more.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>The next morning he wakes, ice cold and shivering. His hands are still damp. He still feels the trace of Ripley’s hands, the ache of his body at her beck and call. Pulling himself from his bunk is a trial, and he hisses as he goes. Washing his hands clean in the basin is a pang of guilt, knowing he ought to change it but too afraid to have to explain why. But he’s cleaner, after, and he feels less tainted, so he does it.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>The next few days are even colder, and Percy knows they’re coming closer to Whitestone once more, hides inside the cabin during the day and takes watches at night. He sketches again, and Krame is cheered by the knowledge that Percy has taken up an old hobby. He can’t make heads or tails of the detailed casting designs, the odd patterns and dimensions, and Percy isn’t willing to explain. He doesn’t even intend to make it, not really. He just needs to forget. He just needs to take his mind off of his home. Percy designs the revolver before Orthax ever touches him. It shames him, in time. Further impresses upon him the danger of his recklessness, the vile depths of his mind, the lack of judgement. But at the time, it’s just a distraction.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>They pass Whitestone, sell their latest catch at the docks, and turn back, headed south again. Percy begins counting the wages he’s been given. He can’t be this person anymore. It’s been a year, two years, long enough to make him strain under the weight of what little they know of him. He doesn’t want to be tied to that forever. He doesn’t want anyone to know him as that forever. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>The day he decides to leave the fishing boat, he dreams. He’s standing in Castle Whitestone, but it’s not whole- there are beams of timber, crushed stones, chips of glass scattered all around him. The other levels of the castle are destroyed, outright gone, and the hall he stands in is barely there, blown wide open by… something. There’s fog, thick white fog surrounding him, and he can’t make out any of the landscape. So instead he turns to the effort of figuring out where he is. He looks at the glass, eyes it’s colors. Blue and gold, shot through with green and white, Pelor’s symbol and Pelor’s colors. It’s the great hall, he realizes, as he turns to see the long wooden tables, pocked with damage and covered liberally in wreckage. This is where his father died. Where Julius, half the nobles, most of the knights died. He can make out the bloodstains now, the red edges just weeping out from under all the stone and timber. He feels sick. The fog rises up from around him, clots into something thicker, black with ash. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Does this please you?” The smoke hisses, its voice cavernous and hollow. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“No,” he says, spits, half-horror and half-fury. He stumbles back, and when he looks down his foot rests on the hand of a child’s skeleton. Oliver, his mind whispers, and he sobs, staggering away from it. “No! Why are you showing it to me?!” The smoke curls around him like a cloak, covering his back, his shoulders, the soft, vulnerable parts of him. Comforting. It whispers in his ear, coos to him as best its deep, harsh voice can.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“It could be yours. Vengeance. Justice.” Percy shakes his head. “The Briarwoods, debased and defeated. Stonefell executed, as he deserves. Anders the traitor, dead at your feet. Ripley,” and Percy’s whole being shakes, curls in on itself, “Ripley, torn apart.” The mere idea of it brightens, cold and clear in his chest. The possibility of punishing them, repaying his pain, getting rid of them. He had never hoped for that. He had never thought it possible.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“I’m not strong enough,” he whispers. A tendril of smoke curls over his face, brushes away his tears. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“<em>You will be</em>.” </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“How?” He shakes, but his heart burns, glows bright with the viciousness of it. He wants this. He wants revenge. He wants justice. He wants to find them, hunt them down one by one. He wants to bury them all, leave their bodies broken apart and strewn across the mountains. He wants to watch Delilah Briarwood’s blood seep deep into the snow. He wants to see Sylas hanged, twitching and shuddering the way Ludwig had when they’d finally let him die. He wants to see Stonefell split open, arrows littering his corpse like they had filled poor Oliver. He wants to watch Anders burn. He wants to see Ripley humiliated and broken, bloody and helpless and begging for death, shattered the way she had shattered him. He wants to make them </span>
  <em>
    <span>crawl</span>
  </em>
  <span>.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Your clever little weapon will give you what you require,” It curls over him, less a cloak and more a suit of armor. “You will forge your vengeance in steel and smoke.” Its voice is hypnotizing, gently spurring him onward, driving the fury and the fire higher and higher in his chest. “Your time will come.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>He wakes. He feels… alive. More alive than he’s felt in years. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>He begins to make adjustments to his designs. They weren’t intended to properly function when he started them, just an expression of some ideas he’d had, but now he has purpose. Now he has a reason to make this thing. He adjusts the weight balance, shifting some heft towards the handle so the barrel won’t dip, refines the gauge of the metal, smooths out the chambers so he can engrave the names on them. He starts designing bullets, lingers more and more in his bunk when he’s not on duty. He scrawls the list everywhere. Delilah. Sylas. Anders. Stonefell. Ripley. He carves their names into the back of a notebook he stole to keep his designs in, thinks of them every moment he’s on watch. He helps pull nets of fish from the ocean and chants their names under his breath with every long, fully-body tug of the rope. Delilah. Sylas. Anders. Stonefell. <em>Ripley</em>.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>He thinks about the sixth chamber. It’s good for balance, yes, the symmetry is pleasing, but he only has five names. He thinks it’s for him, maybe. He places the barrel to his temple, in his mind, feels the perfect weight of an imaginary gun, the first imaginary gun. He tosses the idea away. He’s not certain enough of that to follow it through yet. He thinks maybe it’s a reminder of the damage these designs could do for someone less…. targeted. He thinks it’s for everyone this gun will kill. The rest of the world, every living, breathing person left on it, condensed down into one damning blank space. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>He weighs the whole world against his vengeance and it leaves the world wanting.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>He refines the trigger, too, carves it down into something delicate, resets the force to something a little less finicky- no use in blowing his hands off. He draws and redraws, sketches and resketches. He climbs the ever-smaller mountain towards progress, chisels piece by piece his bloody legacy into the world. He’s not a fool. Whatever else he is, Percy is clever. He knows where this road leads. He tries to muster some remorse, some repentance, but it’s all still too raw in his chest. He can’t find anything but purpose and cold fury. He just doesn’t care.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>By the time they’ve gone far enough south to reach the Morien Lake, Percy is ready. He stops Krame on the stairs, feverish with the ability, at long last, to make his vengeance real.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Captain.” He says, and Krame looks at him with a sorrow Percy can’t quite parse yet. “I- I’m going to be leaving soon.” Krame nods.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Aye, I’d thought so. You seem like you’ve been…. preparing.” Percy swallows, hefting his sketchbook up to show Krame, papers neatly ordered and yet still visibly the work of a half-mad man.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“I need to talk to you,” he says, and it’s odd how unreal everything feels. It’s like he’s in a dream. Krame nods again, face sad, and escorts him to the captain’s quarters.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“What’s all this about, now?” Krame asks, settling into his chair. He sounds old. Percy had forgotten somehow. He shakes off the strange surprise and flips through his sketchbook- and there are pages. Pages and pages and pages of drafts and designs. Ammunition blueprints, engineer’s notes, chemist’s equations. Some vague suggestions of spell work in the margins, and Krame feels the heavy knot of worry he’s carried for the last year grow, sink further. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“I intend to build this weapon,” he says, and there’s something dark in him when he says it, those blue eyes turning colorless and hard. “I intend to hunt down the people who slaughtered my family, who took my home. I intend to find the people who hurt me and kill them all.” And he looks up, Percy, their friend, a good man and a good worker, who spoke little and slept less. He looks up, and Krame can see there’s nothing he can say to dissuade him. “Tell me what you think.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“It’ll never end, boy,” Krame says, sadly, tiredly. “This thing,” he points to the gun, finely rendered and explicitly murderous. “It’s new. It’s dangerous. And once you make it you can’t unmake it. Once you take a life you can’t give it back. There’s no coming back from where you’re headed, Perce.” Percy’s face softens, something hitting home. Krame doesn’t stop. “I think you’re walking into the darkness. I think you know that, you’re not going blindly. But you need to know that if you ever want to come out you’re going to have to work for it. You’re going to have to claw your way back into the light on the other side.” He reaches out, places a hand firmly, kindly, on the back of Percy’s neck, pulling him close. “It’ll never end, Percy. Not after you’re dead. Not before. Never. You’re making a whole new kind of war.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“I know,” he says, and Krame feels the weight get heavier, harder, clotted like ice in his guts. “I know.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Remember it,” Krame tells him, not unkindly, and presses a kiss to his forehead. It’s the closest Percy has felt to having a father in a year. It hardens him.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“You’ve been very kind to me, Captain, and I thank you.” His voice is thick, but as he speaks it clears. Becomes distant and pristine. “But you know what I must do. And I cannot do it here. I won’t trouble you anymore, but I should hope that if ever you were asked about me, you might deny having seen me.” Krame’s face falls a little more with every word. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Aye, Perce, you’re free to go,” he says ruefully. “I only hope-“ he bites his lip, and Percy is still keyed up on adrenaline and hope, too wild-eyed to see it. “I hope you’re careful, is all.” He dismisses Percy, ruefully, and Percy stumbles out and to the edge of the boat, something, some thing inside of him already calling that Drymma is the place. Drymma is where he should be. Here, it chants, louder, louder louder, come here, here, here, and the roaring in his ears builds so loud he can’t hardly breathe. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>They let him off with little fanfare, Leighton hugging him, kissing his temple for good luck, Fiven patting his shoulder with a sad look in his eye. Maxwell isn’t there. Percy is glad. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>The docks smell like salt, like mud and fish blood and the clean mess of nature. He’s looking for smoke, though, as he winds mindlessly through the muddy streets, searching with keen, hungry eyes for a column, a blacksmith, a forge. He has his glasses on again for the first time in weeks, and there’s something grounding, something about them that makes Percy feel like himself, makes him see differently. He walks until night falls, and on the breath of dusk he sees it. He makes his way quickly, half-jogging, to the door of the forge, whereupon he knocks frantically on the door.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Alright, alright, what the fuck is the hurry?” A woman with much-broken knuckles and burns all up her arms opens the door, clearly looking for something more urgent than a white-haired skinny fisherman. “Just you, then?” He nods, so many words in his throat he has to clear them out to speak. “What’s all the fuss, then?”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“I- forgive me, I’m forgetting my manners. My name is Percival, and I- I’ve been on a ship for two years now, I haven’t had access to a forge. Is there- would there be any possible way for me to perhaps rent yours? I’ll buy supplies and metal for myself, and I’d pay you a fair amount, I’d be doing all the work, I swear, I just-” she silences him with a single finger raised.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Calm down.” He tries. “My name’s Lian, pleasure to meet you. How long d’you think you’d be needing it?” She doesn’t look… angry, at least. Looks more curious, a little nonplussed, more than anything else.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“A few days, perhaps? Three at most.” He’s guessing. He’s hoping. If he fucks this up severely enough, it could take longer.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Alright,” she shifts her head back and forth, tilting one shoulder to the other. “Let’s say ten gold a day for gear, forge and loss of profits. That sound fair?”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Absolutely,” Percy says, immediately handing her forty gold. “Thank you ever so much.” She laughs. In hindsight, he wishes he’d gone elsewhere. He wishes he’d picked someone less kind. The last he hears of Lian, Ripley was questioning her. From there…. Percy hopes she was lucky. He knows she wasn’t.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>It feels good, to be within range of a forge again. The heat, the light, the eye-drying soot and ash and smoke. It’s like coming home, in a way. He begins with the casting molds, begins calculating, forming his designs. He works for hours, perfecting each millimeter of detail, each grain of sand, forming every moving part of this new weapon, the first working firearm. He thinks it’s the first anyway, doesn’t think too hard on that point until later. Lian sits in the back, watches him work, sipping tea and calmly observing. He works late into the night, feverish and hungry for the things this will bring him- vengeance, freedom. Happiness. She watches, evenly, unobtrusive. When he finally collapses into rest, he does so involuntarily, her tugging him to a cot in the corner. He dreams of nothing but blood, an ocean of it at his feet. He thinks perhaps Lian doesn’t trust him, but the next day she’s gone. “Just wanted to be sure you wouldn’t kill yourself in here without me,” her note says, and it’s signed with an L and a smiley face. He smiles despite himself, folds it up, keeps it.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>He goes out, buys the iron and the coal and the wood, spares no expense. He builds the forge’s fire high and smelts, tempers, mixes. It’s a blur of hellfire and fury, smoke and intense focus. He makes the barrel, the chambers- six, perfectly spaced- the trigger, the wheellock, the mechanism to turn it, the loading lever, the minute gears and spurs and pieces to make it work. He ends the day painted in sweat, hair dark with it, shirt soaked through, oil and smoke and soot smeared over his face. He has never felt further from being Percival de Rolo, and yet he feels, curiously, as if for the first time he is truly himself. His chest roils, swells, burns, as if he’s breathed in too much smoke, and he passes out, facedown on the cot, hand still clutching the chambers.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>He dreams he’s back in Whitestone, that people are screaming and crying and running. But he has the gun in his hand, he has power, he has the ability to change things. He shoots Stonefell, just to see, to make sure. Stonefell falls, blood spilling over his armor. Percy walks, brisk but unhurried, to the great hall, pulls open the doors. He catches the man with the crossbow in the throat, pulls Vesper behind him. Shoots Sylas in the heart, and he stumbles back, far enough that Julius can pull their father to his feet and drag him to the door. His mother is being tugged, scratching and clawing, to the dungeon, and Percy lands a quick shot on Ripley’s hand. She pulls back, hissing. Oliver stumbles to their mother, and she lifts him, begins to carry him to the door. Percy follows behind, gun trained on anyone who follows. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Ludwig and Whitney are in the hall, scrambling against Delilah’s magic, held in place. He places the barrel of the gun to the back of her head and pulls- they run, weeping, to their family. Cassandra barrels down the hall, Anders chasing her, and with a bullet to the left eye, Percy drops him. Cold. She swings around, and their father holds her close, Vesper turns to Percy, throws her arms around his neck, and Percy feels a softness bloom in his chest. He’s saved them. He’s saved them all. He watches them, clotted up in a cluster, holding each other, tending to small wounds, and for a moment the world is set to rights.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>And then he wakes up.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Cassandra is dead. He watched her fall in the snow. His mother is dead, tortured by Ripley until the last of her life burned from her eyes. His father is dead, cut down first and fastest. Ludwig is dead, tortured and hanged and left to rot in the Sun Tree. Oliver is dead, speared with arrows and crossbow bolts. Whitney is dead, swallowed up by Sylas Briarwood. Julius is dead, a crossbow bolt buried to the hilt in his throat. Vesper is dead, dragged to the very top of the castle and thrown to her death. He misses them so much. His heart aches and his fingers clench, cold around the chamber. He can’t have them back, he knows. But he can avenge them. With this, he can avenge them.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>He pieces it together, as the day wears on, fits mechanism into mechanism, lever and match, barrel and bullet. He carves the five names into it, eyes wide and vacant, images of their deaths burning white-hot in his mind. When it’s done he sits and stares at it, feels it too-cool and body-warm in his hands. He kisses it, compelled, lays his lips on the one blank chamber’s icy metal. Like a secret. Like a promise.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>He calls it the List. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>He sleeps that night, sound and silent, wrapped up in borrowed blankets, new gun pressed to his heart like a precious thing.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Percy dreams of Ripley, only this time he’s in control. She screams under him, writhing and clawing and deliciously helpless as he presses the barrel of the List to her chest. He shoots her in the side, watches her scream and struggle, blood pouring from between his fingers. He moves the blood-spattered gun to her heart, feels the frantic, deerlike heave of her chest, the hysterical fear that causes her to twitch and gasp and eye him with a wide, white stare. He shoots her again, and though it should be a fatal wound she doesn’t die. She just wails, girlish and faint, screeching as he moves the hot, smoking barrel to her throat. He looks down, sees her name carved so exquisitely into the chamber, the bullet with her name on it poised above her. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Percival,” she hisses, as close to begging as she gets. He leans down, presses body-to-body, leg to leg, knees straddling one wiry thigh and hand planted firmly over the wound in her breast. He kisses her, feels a surge of cruel, ugly joy as his finger just squeezes the trigger, as he tastes the blood in her throat as he kills her. He feels himself rouse, feels the burn of his cock begin to strain, and he pulls back from her dying body. She stares at him, blind with hatred, and dies with a warbling, guttering gasp. Wet with blood, his hand goes almost unconsciously to the buttons of his trousers. He smells copper, and smoke, and gunpowder. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>He wakes panting, stomach and thighs wet with come, heart twisted with a mix of disgust and hunger. He pretends everything is fine. Everything has to be fine. He cleans himself up, roughly, harshly, though every time his own skin brushes his cock he feels sick. He takes what little of the supplies are his own, packs them up, racks the ammunition he’s made into a case. He’s cleaning the forge at large, sweeping all the dust into the street, when he hears mention of a Doctor Ripley, four towns away. His blood runs cold, even as the burn in his chest becomes fire. The next hour is a blur, a daze of finally, finally, mixed with the dizzying disgust at the thought of what she might do to him if he fails. He meets Lian on his way out, gun strapped to his side with a crude leather holster. She seems pleased enough with his clean-up and just watches him get ready.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“What did you make, if you don’t mind my asking?” She calls, and he just smiles.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“A list,” he tells her cryptically. “I’ve got to cross some things off, now. Thank you,” he says, more earnestly. “I can never repay you.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“You already did,” she snipes, smiling. “More than most would.” He shakes his head, leaves her another five coins. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>It takes him a year to find Ripley.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>She’s in Stilben, heavily guarded, when he finally catches up to her. She’s quick, he’ll give her that. She always travels guarded, makes frequent journeys back to Whitestone. He can’t bring himself to follow her there, no matter how he tries. He’s spent more time than he’d like camped at the base of the Alabaster Sierras, watching the roads for her. But finally. Finally. Finally, he has her.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>She’s set up a camp on the shore, unearthing something- for the Briarwoods, he expects, and his lip curls- and though there are men on watch all around her, he feels his heartbeat spike, and he wants to try. He wants to see her bleeding, kicked to her knees, crawling away from him. He wants to see her suffer and he wants to see her die, and no man can stand between him and his vengeance. Not now. The smoke collects, wispy and a soft, gentle, grey, at the ends of his sleeves, the corners of his coat. He doesn’t notice.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>The first gunshot cracks through him like a pulse of lightning, energizing and sharp. The man’s sword falls to the sand, and Percy darts past him as he falls, clutching his arm and groaning.  The smoke trails him, rippling from the gun like ink in water. The next guard gets a shot to the leg, choking and grasping his wound as Percy keeps running. He can almost see her. He sees the back of her, small, distant, ever so close. His blood roars in his ears, he sprints, glasses fogging with the heat of his face, furious, hungry, vicious with bloodlust.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>They grasp him by the wrists, and drag him away. He fights them, of course, struggles and screams and claws out. It’s a wonder she doesn’t recognize him from that alone- she’s so familiar with his screams, after all. But she doesn’t. She doesn’t turn. She doesn’t see him. It’s almost more disappointing than failure. He doesn’t drop the gun, though. He doesn’t drop the gun. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>They drag him around a corner, into an alley, and they beat him in rounds. One man likes to kick him, another enjoys the particular wet crunch of his nose breaking, his cheekbone snapping, and yet another seems to love the way he gasps, groans, whimpers at the man’s shoe crushing his cock between his legs. The last one batters his stomach until he’s spitting blood, and he assumes some of Ripley’s old work has broken open again. He’s in agony. It’s too much, too much. He’s so weak, has always been so weak. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“If we didn’t have better things to do,” the third man grins into his face. “Just know this would’ve ended with my cock in your mouth.” He slaps the side of Percy’s face, knocks his glasses loose, and grabs the back of his head by what little hair has grown in. The ground comes at him very quickly, and Percy is thankful </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>The next time he wakes, he’s in a cold stone cell, stripped down to his underclothes. For a moment, he’s dizzy, sick with the fear that he never truly left Whitestone, that he’ll sit up and find Ripley, smiling, on the other side of the bars. He feels so much pain. It’s not the same sharpness, the same precision as what Ripley enjoyed, though, and he can almost hope it isn’t her work. He feels the manacles weighing his arms down, feels the chains, the cold air rushing over his body, and is forced to confront the fact that despite his weapon, despite his time, he was not, in the end, truly prepared. Percy sits up, wincing, shaken, and sees nobody. The cell is unfamiliar, the stones different, the bars different, the chains all wrong. He is still captured, and it is still a problem, but he is not in Ripley’s hands. He is not in Castle Whitestone. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>He sits, feeling quite naked, quite vulnerable, and thinks of how he’s failed them. His parents, noble and kind and just. Julius, who strained ever at the confines of his role as heir, who was perhaps too reckless and too loud, but who never did wrong by anyone but himself. Vesper, his favorite sister, favorite sibling, who never did anything without thinking it through six times, who was unflinching in the face of danger, who always had a gentle touch and a kind word for anyone she spoke to. Ludwig, mischievous and high-spirited, the eldest of the triplets, who suffered so much with such bravery, who had looked Percy in the eye and begged him not to cry. Oliver, the youngest of the three, quiet and shifty, who seemed destined for spycraft or theft or worse, always passing his treasures around to those he thought would appreciate them. Whitney, dreamy and sweet, absorbed in her books and her writing, lost in a world so far away, who had always dreamed with him of the Feywild, the Plane of Fire, the Shadowfell and the realms beyond the Divine Gate. Cassandra. The most objectionable and least understanding, the youngest and the most annoying and the one who saved him. Bold and brave and stubborn. Dead. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Because of him. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>He’s in that jail for months. He rots, festers, seethes, thinking of Ripley escaping. He burns with it, the awful, painful love for his family and the bright, flickering specter of vengeance. He is not visited, is not tortured, but in a way it’s worse. It’s worse to be left alone, caught up in his own thoughts and unaware of time. His body heals, slowly and imperfectly, and he has to set his own broken nose, has to shove scraps of fabric into his drawers to cushion his bruised genitals. He aches, inside and out, for so long. He doesn’t even know where he is. They don’t tell him. He grows hopeless, tired. His eyes dull, his anger slows to loathing. They feed him, faceless guards with trays of dirty water and flavorless gruel. His body thins, but doesn’t die, though his vengeance starves. He doesn’t speak, anymore. He doesn’t do anything but grow thinner, and angrier, and sadder and lonelier and more and more hopeless. The air stays cold, and for that he is thankful, because it reminds him of Whitestone. Sometimes he dreams himself back there, and it breaks what’s left of his rotting heart. Through all the summer he’s there, and into autumn, whereupon he finally finds himself facing someone other than a guard.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Hi,” the redheaded half-elf says, smiling. “I’m Keyleth!” </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Percy blinks.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Keyleth! Key- who the fuck is this?” The man who comes skidding in is tall, dark-haired, dangerous-looking, with knives that flicker into his hands and a sharp face. The woman in front of him is softer, freer, less deadly and more naive. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“I don’t know, but he seems like he’s been here awhile!” She’s not being quiet, though it seems a little like she thinks she is. Percy swings his legs down to rest on the floor, standing. He tries to move closer, but the chains go taut, and he’s forced back a little. The man watches him, frowning, cataloguing his appearance. Percy is less than optimistic on his chances of getting out.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Vax scans him, top to bottom, glances at the hollow, gaunt face, the sunken eyes, the dark shadow over him. He catches the blood on the man’s sleeves, the fact that though his hair is white, he’s young-  very young, Vax thinks, and it pains him a little- that though his spectacles are cracked and his mouth won’t seem to open, there’s a sharp, calculating intelligence in those eyes. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Vax takes out his lockpicks, and shoos Keyleth aside. “What’s your name?” He calls to the man, even as he begins to break him out. “I’m Vax, that’s Keyleth.” The man says nothing, just shrinks back in his cell. Vax cracks the lock, pushes the door open. The man flinches back when Vax moves towards him, and Vax raises his hands. “I’m not going to hurt you,” he says, letting the suspicion melt from his face, letting himself be nonthreatening. “It’s okay, hold on.” Percy reluctantly lets the man undo his shackles. The manacles around his ankles are first, and Vax’s hands pause at the scars visible on the stretch of leg between the metal and his clothing. He doesn’t ask, though, and moves on to Percy’s hands. Vax catalogues the scars there, too, reasoning the causes, the implements. The Clasp has taught him enough to know. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>They pull him from the cell, take him to the room where all the prisoners’ belongings are stored, and while they loot everything they can, Percy finds his coat, his things, his gun. He feels whole again with it by his side, feels calmer, feels more like himself. The short, brown coat he’d taken from the fishing boat isn’t as much cover as he’d like, but it’s enough for now. His rescuers take him to the rest of their group, all of them bright and lively and chatty, and as they walk, cheerfully, to the base of the Umbra Hills, Percy swallows, and says in a voice so rough it hurts to speak, “My name is Percival Frederickstein Von Musel Klossowski de Rolo the Third. It’s a pleasure to meet you.” He smiles, faintly. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Please call me Percy.”</span>
</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0002"><h2>2. The Travails of Becoming Friends With A Madman, or, alternately, Percival Forgets That He Is A Man Possessed</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>Night terrors and daylight dangers plague Percy and Vox Machina</p>
          </blockquote><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>This chapter is, somehow, even worse than the last. The first half is just a lot of horrifying memories and then the second is Vox Machina Bickering (TM) and there's so much "my siblings are gone" angst throughout so that's... a wee bit of mood whiplash upon rereading. And also, as I said before, I wrote this back before the corresponding issue of VM Origins came out, so it's probably not 100% canon-correct</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <span>Percival doesn’t do much talking for the first few days following his impromptu release from prison. From day one it unsettles them, all of them but Keyleth all too used to shifty motherfuckers avoiding questions. They know his name, at least, and after the first night they relax a little, but for that first night they all sleep a little more lightly than usual. They find a nice cave, set deep into the rock, and Vex camouflages the entrance. Keyleth drops immediately, tired and worn with the amount of magic she’s done. Vax stays up, mistrustful, and watches Percy not sleep. He barely moves, just sits, still and stonelike, eyes uncomfortably wide and clearly, deeply haunted. Vax knows something happened, something awful, something that left the kind of scars even the Clasp shied away from, but whether or not it was deserved… he couldn’t say. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>Percy sits, ears roaring with the sound of gunshots and the trickling of water somewhere deep in the darkness behind them. He knows these people are unknown variables, each of them skilled and deadly, each of them all too capable of killing him in an instant. He knows they’re out in the wilds, far from Ripley, far from Whitestone, but something in him won’t stop ticking, won’t stop moving. The machinery in his mind won’t still, just keeps churning, twisting, laying his pain before him. He wasn’t ready. He failed. He went after Ripley, and even now, years later, even with his gun, he wasn’t really ready. He has no chance. He has no hope. His eyes are wide, fearful that if he closes them he’ll see Whitney again, bleeding and sobbing, the faint whisper of disgust as she looks at him. If he closes his eyes he’ll see the Briarwoods smiling at him, he’ll see Ripley’s face over his. More frighteningly, he thinks, maybe he won’t see anything. Maybe he’ll just be alone. In the dark.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>He fears what his mind might conjure then, from imagination rather than memory, and he blinks the thought away, sinking instead into an extended reverie, reliving, remembering, letting his heart be torn into again. He thinks of Vesper, the way she used to bring him books. Her voice, soft and gentle, telling him that even if diplomacy wasn’t in the cards for him, he might very well be the cleverest of the three of them. He remembers blushing, remembers her hand ruffling his hair, her laugh. He remembers those books, whole shelves he’d treasured, how they’re all gone now, in the Briarwoods' hands, if not burned. He thinks of Julius, coming home laughing and drunk, stumbling into Percy’s room to show him the new scar over his eye. “Looks dashing, doesn’t it?” He’d grinned, and Percy had told him to clean it, lest it get infected. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>He remembers Julius sneaking off in the middle of a formal ball, asking Percy and Vesper to cover for him- “I’m meeting a girl,” he’d whispered, climbing over the balcony. “Don’t tell anyone! Say I’m sick!” He’d fallen, nearly snapped an ankle, but he’d made it into town in time to meet his girl, Percy thinks. He wonders, sadly, if she’s even still alive. If the Briarwoods had killed her, or if she lives still, passing his brother’s grave and trying not to think of him.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>He thinks of Whitney, thinks of her death and the flash of <em>disgust-self-loathing-stirring-arousal-fear-agony</em> that rips through him at the memory of that day makes him sick. He hates it. He hates himself. He pushes past it, shoves aside the memory of Ripley’s voice, teasing, humiliating, pushes away the awful, horrible memory of Whitney’s pale, drained face. He thinks instead of Vesper’s books, of days spent on the floor, poring over pages and comparing information, coming up with lists of rules to follow and spots to visit in every place. Marquet, Issylra, the Feywild. It hurts the same. His heart still convulses, his stomach twists, full of guilt. He remembers how soft her hair was, every time she threw himself at him in a hug, the particular green tilt of her eyes, the hundreds of times he had to walk down to the village and pull her out of the Sun Tree. He remembers being a brother, a good brother. He remembers failing all of them when it most mattered. He sits. He doesn’t move. He hardly breathes. He wishes he’d died with them. It would be more than he deserves.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Vax’s watch ends without incident, and he passes it off to Scanlan, because even though the gnome has the tact of a coconut he’s good at catching shiftiness, knows dishonesty and illusion better than anyone. Scanlan hasn’t seen the scars, nobody else but Keyleth has, and Vax isn’t about to tell him in front of Percy, but they can all tell there’s something…. off about their new friend. There’s something that feels dangerous about him. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>Scanlan watches Percy, too, but he does so completely unashamed, smiling and raising an eyebrow every time it gets to be too much for Percy and he looks up at the gnome. He always looks back down, something beaten about him. Something broken. It’s like a part of him wants to ask Scanlan if he’s got a fucking problem, but the rest of him shoves him down and tells him he has no right to ask. It’s funny. Scanlan laughs a little, after the fourth time. “Something you want to say, old man?” He asks, voice all honey and showmanship. Percy feels the prick of something warm, but he can’t quite distinguish what it is. Later, much later, he’ll learn to recognize it as affection, but that comes with time. Percy shakes his head, barely, just a minuscule jerk back and forth. Scanlan leans back on the wall and watches with a growing thread of concern as Percy flinches back. “It’s alright, old-timer, we’re not going to hurt you. Unless you hurt us.” His voice drops, still grinning, but a little dark. “Then we’ll <em>fillet</em> you.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Percy doesn’t want to hurt them. He’s tired. He’s so tired. He did more moving today than he has in months. He thinks it’s been months. He can’t say. All he knows is that the instant he left that prison cell everything inside of him got worse. He wants to sleep, but he doesn’t know- he doesn’t know if he can trust them. He doesn’t know what he’ll have to be on guard against. He doesn’t know if he wants to stay. He just stares, moon-eyed and horribly, horribly vacant at Scanlan. Scanlan’s concern mounts. It’s uncomfortable. He doesn’t enjoy it. Scanlan does not <em>do</em> concerned. Percy doesn’t sleep that first night, doesn’t sleep through Vax’s watch or Scanlan’s or Grog’s, following them. His legs ache, his stomach churns at the presence of any actual food, he swallows water from the stream they find like he hasn’t had any in months. He doesn’t talk. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>The next day they head to the Frostweald, and Percy comes with them. He gets the feeling, from the way they act, that he wouldn’t exactly be allowed to leave. He’s little better than a hostage. They eat quickly, and he doesn’t eat at all. The other gnome, small and sweet, seems concerned.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Don’t you want some real food? They didn’t seem like they fed you much in that prison.” Her face is strained, and he takes the roll she offers him just so she won’t be upset on his behalf. He’s fine. He’s not hungry. He’s just hollow. He nods his thanks and doesn’t eat it. The twins- and they must surely be twins, the way they look and act and talk- watch him suspiciously, carefully. Both of them seem sharp-edged and cold, hardened. He’s glad. A little sympathy is too much. More than he deserves. He stays quiet, keeps the roll, cold and wrapped in a rag, in his pocket. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Thank you,” he murmurs, voice rough like sawblades and just as unpleasant. He doesn’t speak again, not for hours, but if nothing else Percy is polite. He was raised with manners.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“There you go!” Pike says, and he knows her name is Pike, but there’s so much in his head, so much- “You’ll be better in no time.” </span>
</p><p>
  <span>He doubts that. He doubts he’ll ever be better. But he nods, offers her a pale, insincere half-smile. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>It takes them a full day to start into the Frostweald, railed with sleet and snow and the freezing cold. Percy’s hands turn blue and red, white and violet, but he’s never been so glad for the pain. It distracts him from other pains, from the decaying, rotting throb of his heart, the ache in his legs, the burn of sympathy. The others offer him gloves, hats, “fancy robes,” and he only takes the gloves when it gets hard to move his fingers. He has to be able to shoot. He has to. It’s all he’s good for, now. A part of him says to throw the gloves back to the tall, mountainlike man, says to let his hands turn to ice, says to let himself die here, immobilized and insensible. He’s not much better than that as he is now, his mind coos, in a voice like Ripley’s. He finds it hard to argue. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>That night, against his own will, Percy does sleep. Keyleth pulls him down to the soft mulch of the forest floor, and he awkwardly holds her hand as she falls asleep. He gives it back to her, gently, and moves several feet away to lie down on his own. Within moments, eyes transfixed by the soft light of the stars, he slips into slumber. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>He dreams. It’s horrible. He’s back there, back under the castle, tied down, at the mercy of the Briarwoods, at the mercy of Ripley. He’s blindfolded, gagged, but he knows the feeling. It’ll never leave him, not really. His legs are spread, tied to the front legs of the chair. His hands are shackled, tied together so tightly that he can feel the bloodflow halted in his fingers. His clothes are gone, undershirt and drawers exposing far too much flesh. It’s only been a night, a day, but Ripley has made remarkable progress. He can feel the cuts, the bruises. The grind of bones and the near-snapped tendons. He can feel her cutting his remaining modesty away, leaving him with nothing but shame. He can feel himself draw inward with the cold, can feel the heat rapidly leave his thighs, his chest, his soft cock. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>He can hear soft laughter, the low rumble of Lord Briarwood, the high ripple of Lady Briarwood. He can feel Ripley’s hand stroking over his body, taking a brief moment to tug at his nipples, pebbled from the shock of winter air, to stroke over his rib cage, pressing at the particular ribs she’s already broken. She lets her hand drift, proprietary and horrible, down to his cock, traces her fingertips over his shaft, and he can feel her warm chest pressed to his back, his bound arms. He can hear the hitch in her breathing as he sobs, as his cock bobs obediently, hardening at her beck and call. “Good boy,” she says, and it’s sickening the rush of relief he feels at that. “You’ll be good for me, won’t you?” She asks, fisting his shaft, rubbing one gloved thumb over his soft, dripping head. “You won’t make me take that sweet little mind from your head?” He shakes his head frantically, gasping around the thick, spit-sticky wad of fabric between his teeth. She strokes him more, until he’s hot and flushed, dripping, straining against her. She slides a cold, metallic ring down his cock, lets it rest at the base of his shaft, forces him to stay erect. She pulls the blindfold from his face, and at first he can’t see anything. Even the low lantern light is too much. His eyes flutter open, hesitant, and he sees Lord and Lady Briarwood, as he expected, smiling ominously. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>Between them, sobbing silently, is Whitney. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>He’d wondered. He’d hoped she’d gotten away, prayed, as Ripley vivisected him, as her knife split his skin, that she’d been lucky enough to slip down to the city. He screams, wails, even though the gag muffles it. He can’t help it. He can’t stop it. It’s <em>agony</em>, it’s <em>heartbreak</em>. He can’t think. He’d seen Oliver‘s body. Vesper, he knew, he <em>knew</em>, was dead. Julius and their father had died that night, too, he had seen them staring blankly in the next cell over. Cassandra was upstairs, even now, the youngest, the most stubborn. Their mother. Their mother was here. But Ludwig, <em>Whitney</em>. He had hoped. Nobody had mentioned either of them, so he had hoped. Percy opens his mouth, as far as his jaw can stretch, and he can’t stop. He just screams, tears slipping from his eyes. Whitney is held, suspended, by her wrists from the ceiling, her toes just scraping the ground. Lord Briarwood is stroking her hair, his wife has a palm pressed to her straining, stretched torso. She’s looking at him with the same, awful understanding. She’s weeping. He wants to call to her, to beg her to look away. He thinks this time it’ll be him. That Ripley will slit his throat, or disassemble him before her, that Lord Briarwood will drain his body dry. He thinks, foolishly, that perhaps he is the expendable one. He knows, disgusted, that he is.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Hush, now,” Ripley says dispassionately. “A good tool doesn’t scream.” She yanks his head back, dark hair tangled in her fingers, and his voice dies. He tries not to think of how he must look, tries not to think of the way Ripley coaxed him to arousal before she let him see, tries not to think of what it means. “Now,” she says, the slightest purr in her voice, and he whimpers at the feeling of a noose sliding tight around his throat. Despite himself, he feels his cock throb, feels the pulse of arousal strong and unforgivable. Whitney keens at the way Ripley drops the rope, steps on it just where it keeps Percy’s head tilted, forces him to look at Whitney’s face. “Be a good instrument,” Ripley murmurs, continuing, reaching down to play with his stones, hand closing tight around the tenderness of his balls. “And do as you’re told.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>He wants to die. He wants, so very clearly, in that moment, to die. He wants it to be over, wants Whitney to look away, wants to scrape all the skin from his body, wants to claw his cock out of himself, wants to score a thousand scars where Ripley is touching him. But he can’t. He’s Ripley’s tool, her instrument. He is the scalpel in this torture. So he sobs into his gag, feels the press of the rope on his pulsing vein and artery, feels the jagged, horrible arousal bloom in his gut. He watches as Lord Briarwood pulls Whitney’s dress down her body, leaving her in her shift, watches as she closes her eyes, tries to wrench away. Lady Briarwood pulls her right back, kisses her temple.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Now, now,” she whispers. “Be a good lamb.” He wants to die. He wants to die. His cock aches, so hard it itches him even when he’s trying, trying so hard to ignore it. He wants to <em>die</em>. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>Lord Briarwood pushes her lovely dark hair from her shoulders, reveals her pale throat. Percy knows what’s coming, but he still has to press down another scream. He is an instrument. He is a tool. He’s not Percival de Rolo. He’s nothing. He’s nobody. Lord Briarwood’s teeth sink, gleaming white, into her vein, and Whitney lets out a terrible, final gasp before she is silent. Blood drips down her shoulder, soaking her shift, staining her whole left side red. Lord Briarwood drinks, and drinks, and <em>drinks</em>. His mouth gapes the way Percy’s did screaming, his throat bobbing, swallowing, the last of Whitney’s life slipping down to his stomach. Percy shakes with sobs. Ripley’s hands continue to pluck at his nipples, tease his cock, scratch at his sensitive thighs. He’s nobody. Whitney shakes, trembles, and he can see the strength leaving her. Lady Briarwood nods imperiously at Ripley, who huffs a short, ugly laugh into his ear. Ripley takes the ring from his cock, pumps harder at him, strokes him like a lover. He’s <em>nothing</em>. He strains, trying to turn away, trying to wrench his body just the slightest bit from her hands. She squeezes him, scrapes her thumbnail along the length of his cock,  pinches, sharply, the head. He weeps, defeated, reduced. She gasps, eyes starry over his shoulder as she watches him convulse, seed dripping over her fingers as Whitney’s body goes slack and dead in her chains. He’s <em>nothing</em>. Sylas Briarwood groans, his own lust barely restrained, into her throat, before he detaches, licking his lips, his own cock swollen with stolen blood. His wife smiles at him, wipes Whitney’s blood from the corner of his mouth. He’s nobody. He can feel Ripley wiping his own come down the side of his face, can smell the awful, twisted mix of blood and sex. He wants to die. Ripley pulls out the gag and pushes her wet, filthy fingers into his mouth. He tastes metal, soap. Semen. He wants, desperately, to bite down, but the part of him that could have is long gone. Suppressed. He laps at her fingers, cleans his own spend from her hands as she smiles. He feels less than human. He feels hollow, empty and bleeding in his chest. He licks his come from her hand, leaves it spit-slick and clean.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Good boy,” she says, and strokes a horrible, gentle hand through his hair before grasping a handful, wrenching his head back once more. “Good <em>pet</em>.” Her grey eyes gleam, approval and pride at her work heavy in her voice. Percy, unwillingly, feels his cock stir, hard once more against his own will. She notices, sneers, and with a crack, slaps him hard enough to snap his cheekbone.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>He wakes, weeping, and wants to die. Vax is staring down at him over Pike’s shoulder, and it is Pike’s hand resting on his wrist. For a moment he considers taking the gun from under his pillow and placing it against his temple. He thinks better of it, but the thought is there.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Percy?” She asks, sweetly, face grave. “You were- you were screaming.” Of course he was. His eyes close, defeated. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I’m sorry,” he says, choked with grief and disgust. He’s still so caught up in what Ripley made of him that he doesn’t even think about what he says, just defaults to what she’d want from him. “You can just- you can just kick me awake. Next time. It won’t stop.” Her face crumples, and Vax behind her looks at once both disturbed and unsurprised.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“We’re not going to kick you,” he snorts. “Just wanted to be sure you were okay.” Percy just shakes his head. He’s not. He never will be.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Sorry,” he says again, and his throat gives out a little, as if he’s said too much for it to handle. He coughs, blood rising in his throat, and Pike makes a noise that’s half alarm and half concern. He spits it into his sleeve and shakes his head again. “Sorry.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I could- I could give you something to help with the nightmares?” Pike still tries, and the gratitude he feels is still too little, but he knows it won’t work. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Not dreams,” he spits, more blood on his lips. “Memories.” He rolls over, curled up angry and hurt and bitter. Pike’s small, warm hand rests on his shoulder for a long moment, and he can feel that both she and Vax are still there. He hears the murmur of a prayer, and he squeezes his eyes shut, feeling even worse. He doesn’t deserve that. It won’t even help him. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Do you think it’s the skull?” He hears Vax ask quietly. “It’s not called a Nightmare for no reason.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I don’t think so,” Pike replies, and Percy squeezes his eyes shut even more tightly. “I think he’s just very sad.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Vax doesn’t respond, but Percy can feel the pity in his stare, and it pricks at him. This isn’t who he is, he thinks. He wants to think of himself as Percival, but it’s hard. Percival was clever, strong-minded. Brisk and opinionated and a bit of an asshole. He was a brother, a son, an intellectual, a scholar. Whoever he is now is just… tired. Tired and sad and full of grief. He shifts, lies on his back again, and finds Pike is still by his side, looking at him with such concern he feels like a true asshole for being the cause. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Sorry,” he says again, and his voice is less… raw. It’s still uncomfortable, still awful, but the pain’s been worn out of it. She smiles, sadly, and pats his shoulder again before moving away, clambering up to fall asleep on Grog’s wide, warm shoulder. Vax is perched beside Vex, the two of them taking watch with sharp eyes and suspicious faces. They look at him from time to time, separately, independently, and Vax’s eyes hold sorrow as much as his sister’s hold scrutiny. Percy tries not to sleep. He knows he’ll end up in the same place, full of the same feeling. Screaming.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>He falls asleep eventually anyway, curled up into a grey and brown ball, arms clustered up over his face, legs pulled in, back to the wall. He looks defeated. He looks small. Vex doesn’t know what to make of him. Vax knows something, something that softened him to the other man, and Keyleth will trust anyone. But she’s not certain. He reminds her of Trinket, a little, back when they first met. He has the same sad eyes. The same loss in his every step. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Why do you feel sorry for him?” She asks Vax, abruptly but quietly. He blinks at her, as if confused. “Percy. Why do you feel sorry for him.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I think those guards fucked him up properly,” Vax says eventually. The words aren’t quite descriptive, don’t quite say what Vax means, but they’re still honest and they’re plain in his mouth. Vex nods.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Properly?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Saw some scars when we sprung him from that jail cell. He’s not… they didn’t take good care of him. Some of them looked like Clasp work.” Vex’s head twitches, just a little, because he never brings up the Clasp. Not like this, not in context. She watches him from the corner of her eyes. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>“You think he did something wrong?” She asks. Vax shakes his head.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I think he was just there awhile. Long enough that they got bored of being nice.” He doesn’t look at her. “Seems like he’s lost. Maybe we can get him to Westruun and he can find a job or something.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>They can both feel Percy listening, can see it in the stiff hold of his body. He’s not sleeping. That’s fine.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Maybe he could stay with us,” Vex suggests, eyes fixed on Percy’s back. “Maybe he’s good in a fight.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Yeah, I wonder about that contraption of his. Very shiny.” </span>
</p><p>
  <span>Vex snorts. “Crow.” He makes a face at her, and she laughs properly. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>He shoves her, gently. “That’s magpie to you.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I thought <em>I</em> was the magpie!”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“We’re twins, fuckface, we can both be magpies.” Percy falls asleep half-smiling, comforted by the feeling of a family around him, even if it isn’t his own. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>The dream is a slap in the face. A cruel, awful joke. He’s at dinner with his family, all of them, dressed finely and alive. It’s a warm and comforting memory, and he recognizes it immediately. His father’s birthday, celebrated quietly and simply, no feasts or balls or dances. Just his family, and fine clothes, and fine food. Quality mattered to Frederick de Rolo far more than excess. “Do something perfectly,” he used to tell Percy, watching him tinker with broken clocks and smashed chemistry kits he’d begged off of the local apothecaries. “Do it finely, do it without fault, and your work will be rewarded. To fail is to learn, but to excel is to earn your rest.” Percy had wrinkled his nose, small and boundless with energy, and his father had laughed. “You don’t know it yet, but to rest is a fine thing for the old.” Percy knew now. He knew all too well. Even as he sits, dark-haired and smiling, so young and so happy, the part of him that knows this is a dream aches for true rest, without haunting or horror.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>His mother laughs, candlelight bouncing off of the chestnut curls at the edges of her face, and places a hand on her husband’s shoulder. His father bows in towards her at the same time she does to him, leaning in close, smiling with intimate familiarity, the way all happily married couples do. Though his father sits at the head of the table, Lady Johanna sits at her husband’s right hand, Julius and Vesper on his left. It’s a familiar view, Percy knows it all too well. Vesper is in gold, complementing the warmth of her complexion, Julius in deep blue so close to black it takes a squint to see it. Their parents are in sky blue, radiant like midday, Ludwig and Oliver in royal blue and black, respectively, Whitney in green, Cassandra in a shimmering champagne that even now Percy rolls his eyes at. <em>Always in Vesper’s shadow</em>, his mind snipes, before the sudden pang of loss and affection seeps in. He was in Vesper’s shadow, too. Willingly. <em>Happily</em>. How could he be annoyed with her for the same? He looks down at himself, at his clothes, and he cannot tell the color. He thinks perhaps there isn’t one.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>He remembers the taste of the food, vivid and bright- savory roasted pork, a delicacy so far up in the mountains. Fish was the usual fare, whether as exquisitely prepared as it was by the chefs in Whitestone castle or roasted over a fire in a cottage down in the city. They had cream potato soup, with bacon and celery, onion and garlic, green-gold onion soup with soft, caramelized sweet pink onions atop it, fragrant and warming. There were caramelized roasted vegetables, fresh from the fields, roots and greens, salted and buttered, peppered melon, rare and fine, salted scallops, brought up from the coast, crusted bread with soft insides, fresh cream butter, iced mead and wine, cake bright with lemon and tart, sweet icing. He remembers his family, happy, the ring of Cassandra’s laughter, the soft, quiet snicker of Oliver’s voice, the way his parents had seemed so proud to hear what progress he’d made in his studies lately. He remembers Whitney speaking to Julius at extraordinary length about Ank’harel, about the Bay of Gifts. They spoke of becoming pirates, he thinks. He was too busy arguing cladistics with Ludwig to really know.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>He doesn’t remember Julius bleeding into his soup. He doesn’t want to remember it that way. He tries not to look. Whitney begins to bleed, too, even as she laughs and talks and moves her hands animatedly. Vesper begins to crumble, her face being pounded in by the long, long fall, her limbs snapping, her rib cage crushing inwards. Cassandra’s pale gold turns red, arrows sticking out of her like tree branches. They all begin to show, to bleed and warp like ink in the rain.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Percy, suddenly, is <strong>angry</strong>. It’s new. It’s bright, white-hot in his chest. He’s so angry that this is happening, that even this memory is ruined. It makes his chest ache that even one of the happiest moments of his life is torn open like this. Percy grasps his knife in his hand and wishes it would stop. He burns, fury and helplessness. He closes his eyes, commanding himself with every fiber of his being. The anger swells, combatting the soft laughter, the gentle voices of his ghostly, dying, dead family.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>He wakes, immediately. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>He’s on his side, still, all curled up and cold, limbs stiff with strain and chill. It’s morning. The rest of them are getting their things together, scuffing out their footprints and immediately making more, relighting the fire and setting up a meal. He’s not screaming this time, which is nice. He’s haunted by the scent of fine food and blood, and something itches at his throat, like irritation or anger.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“You alright?” Grog asks, squinting at him. Percy nods, slowly, thoughtfully. “Alright. Cause you still look fucked up.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I assure you,” Percy says dryly, “I am still very fucked up.” He thinks he hears a snort of laughter, but he’s still just a little lost in thought. He rolls up his things, takes the gun from under his pillow and straps it to his body once more. He takes a handful of salted, dried meat and an apple, nods his thanks to Grog and Keyleth. He sits outside the cave and thinks, chewing, about how easily he left that dream. How easily he escaped it.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>The rest of them file out, drizzling one-by-one into the sparse daylight. “Where to now?” Vax asks, cavalier and stretching, primed for a fight. “We gotta get to what’s his fuck before Grog turns into a big dead thing, so we should get a move on, yeah?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Lord Eskil Ryndarien,” Keyleth corrects him cheerfully. “He said we’d find a nymph in the Frostweald, but we’ve been here for a day now and no sign of one.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I think he’s a Realmseer, not a Lord, right?” Scanlan pops a piece of cheese in his mouth, and Percy wonders faintly where he got it. “Maybe he saw wrong.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Maybe, but he seems like he knows what he’s talking about,” Vex frowns. “I mean, he’s got… credentials and shit. He’s not just some old man in a robe.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“You don’t get to be one of those without knowing a few things,” Keyleth agrees. Then pauses, looking confused. “At least I don’t think so. You don’t, right?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“No,” Scanlan pats her patronizingly on the head. “But still. What happens if we don’t find a nymph here?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I’m fucked,” Grog supplies helpfully.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I mean, do we go look elsewhere? Where else is there to look?” Scanlan’s face drops a little. “We only have two weeks. That’s… not a lot of time.” Pike, standing beside him, rests a hand on his shoulder, grave-faced and steely.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“We keep looking. We’re barely on the edge of the Frostweald, we can spare another day or two to look.” They all bow a little to her, Percy thinks, taking another bite from the apple. She’s not the leader, none of them seem to be, but she has… influence. She has a solemn, gentle force about her. He swallows, thinking. “If worse comes to worst, we can always go back and ask around for more possible nymph… hide-outs… homes… hidey-holes…” Pike trails off, looking a little disgruntled at her own words. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Yeah, pickle,” Vax says, tousling her hair. “We’ll find one. It’ll be fine! Find a nymph, cut her heart out, leave the scene of the crime, never come back. Nobody will ever know.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“It still feels a little weird to uh, be killing a powerful, natural force for our own selfish ends,” Keyleth admits glumly.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Do you want Grog to die?!” Scanlan asks, looking scandalized. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>“No! I just feel bad!” Keyleth insists, throwing her hands in the air. “We’re going to kill someone!” Scanlan rolls his eyes. “What?!” The druid yelps, looking at Scanlan. “I’m just saying!”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“There goes the element of surprise,” Vax snipes, pointing to the flock of birds currently taking to the air. “Maybe I should give you a lesson or two in stealthing, eh?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Maybe you should,” Vex says, eyeing the birds as they fly. “I suppose we wouldn’t really be able to surprise anything in here, anyway.” She turns, eyeing the whole group. She lingers a little on Grog, sharp face drawing a little in worry. “Shall we get going, then?” She starts out from the base of the mountain, into the thicker woods, and Percy follows, silent, but warmed, just a little.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Hey Grog,” Scanlan calls, hopping onto a jagged rock formation so he can be taller. “We get through this, you’re going to owe us big time.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Yeah, alright,” Grog says cheerfully. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>“It’s not like he signed up for this,” Pike interjects, disapprovingly. “It just happened to him!”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I don’t mind,” Grog says, grinning. “Maybe we’ll meet something we can kill!”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Do NOT jinx us, Grog!” Keyleth complains, looking worried. “We’ve gotten by so well so far!”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Yeah, well, there goes that,” Vax scoffs, offering Pike a hand to help over a large puddle. “We’re all going to die now.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“We’re not going to die,” Vex calls back at them, rolling her eyes. “Nobody is going to die. We’re all going to be just fi-” Keyleth’s foot goes through the thin ground, and there is a sickening, audible, crunch. “Keyleth?” Vex asks slowly. “What was that?” Keyleth looks down, and Percy’s hand goes to his gun, instinctually.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I- I think it’s an egg…?” Keyleth’s voice goes shivery and soft, frightened, and she looks up with the widest eyes Percy has seen in years. There’s a crackle, a hiss, a growl behind him, and he turns, drawing the List, leveling it low where he can hear the noise, and he’s just barely eye to eye with the ugly little hissing lizard before he shoots it, the force of the explosion driving him back a step. He’s still not used to it, has barely used it at all, but it feels… good. It feels strong. He feels strong. An arrow pins the thing low to a tree, and he nods his gratitude at Vex.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Basilisks,” Vax hisses, and Percy has a sudden flash of memory, important, flush to the forefront of his mind. It feels easier and easier, recalling his studies. It’s coming back to practice.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Don’t look them in the eye,” he calls, swiveling, looking for another as the sound of gargled, rough growling rises all around them. “Try not to look at them at all, actually.” Another one launches itself at Keyleth, and he hits it square in its scaly little shoulder, a splash of hot, wet blood in the air and a strange, rising feeling of freedom.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“What happens if we look at them?” Keyleth asks, foot still stuck in a hole. Percy is growing used to the sound now, the whip-crack echo of a contained explosion, the huff of smoke and gunpowder over his face.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“They turn you to stone,” he yells back, and turns to fire at the next one flinging itself towards her. She’s got the right idea, though, all hunched up around her foot, hair covering her face, trying frantically, desperately, to free herself. He hears the melodic thrum of a bowstring, the whistle of arrows and daggers, Scanlan’s humming billowing into bursting song. Pike glows, a brilliant burst of energy and light flowing from her, and Grog bellows, thrashing and slicing and crushing. Even Keyleth tosses out a few spells when she can. Percy reloads, fumbling a little, heartbeat fast and mind hazy with the feeling of power. <em>He’s helping</em>, he thinks. He’s being useful. He’s in control.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>He clicks the chambers back into place, and he fires. Again, and again, and his aim improves. They’re getting the numbers down, he knows, because there are so many fewer than he remembers, little scaly lizard bodies strewn across the snow, blood melting into it. Finally, finally, he fires at the last one, and its skull is obliterated. The blood splatters out, its throat letting loose one last gutteral hiss, and he lowers his gun. Slowly, breathing hard, heat trailing from his mouth and the gun’s barrel. He feels oddly connected to it, as if there is no division between his hand and the weapon it holds, and there’s a very strange feeling in his chest.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Holy fuck,” Grog says, impressed. He turns, still a little bewildered, to find the rest of them staring at him, clumped up and wide-eyed. Percy breathes, feeling frightening. Keyleth limps over and hugs him.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Thank you, Percy,” she says, leaning on him a little. She’s warm, and her touch is kind, and there’s a strange moment where he half-expects a knife in his back. It doesn’t come. He hesitantly, gently, hugs her back. She settles into the hug, and he rubs a hand up her back like he used to do for Oliver.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“It’s the least I could do,” he says. “It really is, literally, the least I could do. I owed you.” She pulls back to look at him curiously, before Pike comes up to put a hand on her leg and heal it.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Ow!” She hisses, then hops up and down on it. “Thanks, Pike.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“No problem!” Pike says sunnily, and then she pats Percy’s leg. “Are you okay?” He nods, smiling faintly.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I’m fine, thank you.” She nods, moving to Vax, who has a long scratch turning an ugly rot-purple on his shin.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“So <em>that’s</em> what that does,” Vax says, letting Pike work on him as he eyes the gun still in Percy’s hand. “Did you steal-?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I made it,” he says, cutting the other man off. “It’s ah- I’ve never seen anyone else with one.” He raises it, looking at the names on the barrels. “I’d never really used it before now.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Does a pretty good fucking job,” Vex says, impressed. “Kind of nice having you around. Pretty helpful.” She reaches into the hole in the ground and pulls out two basilisk eggs, carrying them over to Grog, who holds out a wide-necked bag for her to drop them in.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Really helpful,” Scanlan agrees. “How do you feel about sticking around, old man?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I’m not-” Percy begins to protest- he is, after all, barely twenty-two- but Scanlan laughs.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I’m just fucking with you.” Scanlan smiles, turning to begin walking up the next hill. “We got a nymph to find, people, come on! Hurry up!”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Fuck off, Scanlan!” Vex calls after him, making a face. “We still have shit to get!” She shoves another two eggs into a bag, and Percy is at first mildly worried about how big the bag is, until he watches her add two more and it gets no bigger.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Bag of Holding?” He asks Vax, perched on a tree stump, and Vax nods.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“My sister has entered a minor level of heaven having that around,” he snorts. “The shit we’ve got stuffed in there… we’ll never use any of it.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Well, now you can add ten basilisk eggs to your list of shit you have and will never use,” Percy says dryly, and Vax laughs a little.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“You’re really not half bad once you start speaking up,” he says, and Percy tries not to let the half-smile slip from his face. “I’m not-” he bends forward to see Percy’s face better, to try and meet his eye. “I’m not gonna ask why,” he says, quietly. “I’m not going to make you tell me. But just know that… that you can be one of us, if you like. You can join us if you need a place to be.” Percy nods, mute once more, and tries to swallow back his tears.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I, uh. Thank you,” he says. “I think I’d- I think I’d like to stay.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Yeah?” Vax sounds oddly surprised, but he smiles, pats Percy’s back. “That’s good.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>They start moving, once Pike has made the rounds, catch up to Scanlan at the top of the next minor hill, snow crunching comfortingly under their shoes. Percy is glad of his fisherman’s boots now, though his all-too-short coat leaves much to be desired. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>“So,” Vex says, conversationally, slowing to walk beside him. “You’re talking now.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“It felt about time,” Percy shrugs. “It doesn’t hurt that my throat’s stopped bleeding every time I say a word.” She nods, keeps walking, Trinket a large presence beside her, radiating heat.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Vax said you want to stay.” He nods, this time, still far too caught up to really speak. “I just want you to know that if you fuck with my brother, I will end you.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Oh! No, I- I’m not-” His words are still clumsy, his mouth unused to speech after all that time silent. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Not into men?” Vex asks, arching a brow.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I am,” Percy says, trying not to laugh. “I’m just not- I’m not looking for anything. Anyone. I’m not- I’m in no state to-” he sighs, giving up. She bites her lip, mouth flickering with a smile. “You’re very cruel, you know,” he tells her, watching her try not to laugh.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I’m sorry,” she says, not sounding it at all. “It’s just that you seemed so composed.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I assure you,” Percy sighs, breath whispering into the air like pale, pale smoke. “I am nothing of the sort.” Vex just laughs, shaking her head. He tries not to think of the assumption, tries not to think about Vax assuming, but the walk grows quieter and quieter as they forge ever-deeper into the Frostweald. They pass many pools, frosted beautifully with thick, solid ice, many groves and meadows and clusters of trees painted with diamond frost and quartz-like snow, but there is no nymph. They walk and walk, and Percy wanders a little away from the main group. He can almost pretend he’s in the Parchwood, like this. Can almost pretend he’s home. He’s lost in thought, ruminating on staying, on forging more bullets, on forging better bullets, when his foot lands, unexpectedly, in a pool of water.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Excuse me,” Percy calls, voice creaking and rough with cold. “I think I’ve found something.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Hey, what’s that?” Scanlan asks, peering around Percy. “Is that-?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“It’s the pool we’re looking for,” Pike breathes, and Percy again feels a rush of awful, undefinable joy at the fact that he’s been helpful. He’s been of use. It floods through him, collects like nervous energy at the tips of his fingers. Ripley must have trained him well, to still feel it after all this time. He can hear her voice, just a little, calling him “good boy,” and digging her nails into his cheek.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Where’s the nymph?” Vax asks bluntly, apparently unimpressed. “We need her, not just the pool. Oh, nymphy!” He calls, splashing out a little into the pool. “Nymphadora!”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Get back here,” Vex hisses, pulling him out by the collar of his shirt. “You have to be polite.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Why?” Vax snorts. “So she can invite us in for tea? We’re going to cut her heart out, not have a chipper little party.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“You have to be polite to the fae,” Percy says, and they look at him, both of them, with strange faces. He looks back, thinking very fondly of Whitney. “You must abide by the rules of etiquette, and offer them the respect they deserve, or else they’ll be free to treat you as rudely as you have treated them.” He leans down, smooths out the thick tracks of Vax’s boots in the mud. “It’s all about respect,” he murmurs, and Keyleth stumbles down to stand beside him at the very edge of the pool.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Should I- should I offer them something?” She asks, and he nods, smiling. “Okay. Okay okay okay, um.” He watches, with no small awe, as she pulls from the air a frosted orb, ice spun into a beautiful lantern. She hums, twisting her hands, and small, delicate periwinkle blossoms ripple over it. “Like this?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Oh, yes,” Percy says admiringly. “That’ll do nicely.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Okay, um,” Keyleth bends, kneels, and softly drops the orb into the water, watches it bob and float towards the center of the pool. “Excuse us, but we really need your help. We don’t mean to intrude, but-”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“We ask a favor of you, if you are willing to give it,” Percy continues, and the rest of them hear him true, for the first time, no rasp of disuse or thick sadness in his mouth. He sounds royal, almost, something deep and rich blooming in his words. “One among us has suffered a wound under the darkness of an evil lich, and he requires the purity and light of your heart. We would ask for your aid, and offer our own in return, if you have need of it. We understand that this is a great sacrifice we ask, and we would mitigate the damage as best we can.” For a long moment, there is silence, then the pretty frosted capsule of air is snatched beneath the water. Another pause, and then a soft rise appears in the water, a wide lifting, like a head beneath a blanket, and the higher it rises, the clearer it becomes that it isn’t a rise at all, but the nymph’s face. It rises slowly, easily, long, thick, hair draping around it, splitting from the water a little at a time. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Oh,” Vax says, a little dumbstruck, and the rest of them are equally speechless. She’s beautiful. She has pale, aquamarine skin, oddly translucent, dewy like the waxy petals of a magnolia blossom in the refracted white light from the snow. She blinks at all of them with vibrant pink eyes that shimmer like lotus petals, hair like foaming, streaming water that moves, almost alive, on her head and shoulders.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Who among you has suffered this wound?” She asks, and her voice is strange- high and warbling, a little like birdsong. “I would speak with him before I offer anything I cannot afford to give.” Percy bows once more, gesturing to Grog.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“The goliath Grog-?” And he pauses, looking to the rest of them.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Strongjaw,” Pike pipes up. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Grog Strongjaw, a hero of this land, and a good man, despite his rough exterior.” Percy recalls his upbringing, and there’s something bittersweet and familiar about this, like stretching muscles long underused. “We ask only that you return him safely if he does not meet your esteem, for we would spend as much time with him as possible, even if that time is limited.” The nymph looks at him, appraisingly, then nods, turning to Grog and offering one crystal blue hand.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Come, warrior carved of stone,” she says, and Grog takes her hand with a strange, skittish gentleness that clearly endears him further to her. “Water and rock have long been friends. We shall speak in private, and perhaps you shall be worthy of my heart, after all.” She pulls Grog thigh-deep into the water, and they all watch as she slips down beneath the surface of the pool- and Grog with her. Barely a ripple, and they’re both gone.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Wait-!” Vex says belatedly, as they disappear beneath the waves. “How long will this take…” she lets the words trail off, frowning at the pool. “Alright,” she huffs, plopping down beside Trinket. “We’ll wait.” Vax sits on Trinket, and Pike and Scanlan brush the leaves off of a half-submerged rock at the edge of the water. Percy stands, watching the leaves blow in the wind, fall and disappear under the surface of the water. None of them float, he observes, and it’s eerily beautiful to see the water remain untouched. There’s something undeniably Other about it, fey and strange and deadly, but that just makes it more alluring. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>Percy has never been particularly fond of harmless things.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>The rest of them look at him, at the strange, soft light on his face, the honest half-smile.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“You look happy,” Keyleth asks without asking. The light dims immediately, the smile wiping clear from his face as he takes off his still-cracked glasses to clean them. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I ah, I’ve always wanted to visit the Feywild.” He could elaborate, he knows. Perhaps he should. But he doesn’t want to. There’s still something tender about it. To even mention Whitney, to say her name would, he thinks, destroy him. His family exists now only in his mind. They’re safe there, guarded and kept in the many-walled fortress of his head. He feels a curious weight in his stomach, an aching sorrow. He doesn’t say anything, after that, just stands quietly, gazing off into the mist and thinking of his siblings, thinking of Whitney and how much she would love to see this, how Julius and Grog would probably get along all too well, how Oliver would happily join Vax in his disappearing act. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>He tries to stop thinking of them. All it does is hurt.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>A little over an hour later, Grog is back, dripping wet, smiling strangely, a glowing blue gem cradled in his overlarge hands. Pike immediately runs to him, and he hefts her up to sit on his shoulder. “Lookit what she gave me, Pike!” He shows her excitedly. “Her heart!”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Very romantic,” Vax deadpans. “Now let’s shove it into that wound of yours.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“We don’t actually know if that’s what we have to do,” Vex chides, flicking his ear. “We have to take them back to Eskil.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Right. Musty old bastard.” Vax rubs his ear, glaring at her. Grog wades back to shore, Pike gushing about it all over his shoulder. Percy climbs back up the grade to more level ground, gladder still for his fisherman’s boots as his feet are suckered down in the mud. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>“That was slick of you,” Scanlan says, eyeing Percy with an appraising look, eyes narrowed. Percy shrugs. “Real slick. Where’d you learn to talk like that, jailbird?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Jail,” Percy says blandly, and keeps walking. </span>
</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>Percy, in episode 115: I miss my sisters<br/>Me, sobbing: he *misses his sisters*<br/>Me, writing this fic: Percival de Rolo was a GOOD BROTHER and ADORED his siblings!!!!!!</p><p>honestly this is just an excuse for me to talk about what a fucking tragedy it is that the whole de Rolo family is dead, because it's something I spent most of campaign one thinking about. They were so clearly a wonderful, loving family who Percy adored and they were just... slaughtered. In front of him. And it haunts me.</p><p>Also Ripley and The Briarwoods and their weird semi-nonsexual murder kink throuple is both... So Gross and also very much up my alley.</p>
        </blockquote><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>I am.... so sorry. I mean I'm not going to stop. But I'm sorry. </p>
<p>I do have the next chapter and a half(?) written, as well as a few snippets and pieces for later on, so while it may stay a wip for a while, it will always still be in progress. I have no intention of outright abandoning this story. It serves as a nice catharsis for me to write about Percy getting better. Makes me feel like I can get better, you know? </p>
<p>Hope this wasn't too traumatizing, and that if anyone reads it they get... idk.. something good out of it? I'm not sure how. but whatever. it's 2 am. I'll regret this tomorrow.</p></blockquote></div></div>
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